I have an application that requires Node.JS v0.8.x. The currently stable version of Node.JS available is 0.8.7, which is perfect. Unfortunately, the site that hosts the RPMs for Node is not very up-to-date, and does not have an RPM for version 0.8.x at this time.

Questions:

Is there another source for RPMs that may have the latest stable build?

If not, is there a crafty way to roll my own RPM? (I do not have rpmbuild availabe on my system.)

If not, what is the best way to remove my current yum-installed version of Node.JS and install from the tarball of binaries, while making sure the correct versions of V8 and such get installed? (I prefer not to build from source... disk space is tight, and installing GCC might put me close to, or over quota.)

2 Answers
2

There is. With a local Fedora system you can extract the EL SRPM, replace the tarball, rebuild the SRPM, and then use mock to rebuild the RPM for EL with the new version of Node. mock will do the hard work of downloading and installing the build requirements within a chroot and then build the new package from the new tarball.

Note that this is not always a trivial task since the newer version may have additional requirements with regard to both building and with patching in order to bring it up to a buildable state.

Some folks on irc.freenode.net/#Node.js just let me know that V8 is compiled in by default, and that the binary tarball available can simply run without trouble. Given that, I will be removing the RPM version and simply extracting that tarball and running it.